Washes and Shading: The Easiest Way to Add Depth to Your Miniatures

Hey again, friends. You've basecoated your model. Everything has color on it. And it looks... flat. Like a toy. One solid color per surface, no depth, no dimension. It looks like you colored in a coloring book and called it a day.

Don't worry. This is exactly where you're supposed to be. And the fix is probably the single easiest technique in all of miniature painting. Washes. Some people call them shades. Some people call them liquid talent. That last one isn't wrong.

A wash is basically very thin, transparent paint that runs into the recesses and low-lying areas of your model, making them darker. It settles into the cracks, the folds in cloth, the gaps between armor plates, and suddenly your flat-looking model has shadows. It looks three-dimensional. It looks like it exists in real space with real light hitting it. And all you did was slop some thin paint over it. This is not rocket surgery.

What Washes Are (and What They Aren't)

Washes weren't invented by Games Workshop. In all likelihood they were borrowed (like most things in our hobby) from scale modelers, and they've been around far longer than I've been alive. But GW did popularize them in miniature painting, and their shade range is what most of us start with.

At their core, washes are just very dilute paint with extra flow improver. The low surface tension means the pigment slides off raised areas and pools in recesses. That's the whole trick. Dark pigment in the low spots, lighter raised areas mostly untouched. Your brain reads that as shadow and light, and the model pops.

What they aren't: a replacement for actual painting. I've seen people dip an entire unpainted model in wash and call it done. That's... well, it's a choice. Washes work best when applied over solid basecoats, where they have a color to push into shadow rather than just staining bare primer.

GW Shades: The Classics

If you own exactly two washes, make them Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade (or Egg Racks Earthshade, however you want to pronounce it. I've heard myself say it six different ways in one video). These two handle about 80% of your washing needs.

Nuln Oil is a black wash. Use it on metals, dark surfaces, anything where you want clean, neutral shadows. It's the one you'll reach for most often. Metal armor with a coat of Nuln Oil over it looks fantastic with almost zero effort.

Agrax Earthshade is a warm brown wash. Use it on skin, cloth, leather, wood, bone, basically anything organic or earthy. It adds warmth and depth without looking as stark as black shadows. A lot of painters (myself included) like to do a two-step wash process on metals: Nuln Oil first for the dark shadows, then Agrax over that for a warmer, more realistic tone.

The New GW Shade Formula

Games Workshop recently reformulated their entire shade line, and I was genuinely surprised. The new formula tints the raised surfaces much less while keeping the same depth in the recesses. It acts an awful lot like how oil washes behave, which is something I've never seen an acrylic wash do before.

This is actually a big deal in practice. With the old formula, after applying a wash you'd often have to go back and repaint the raised areas to clean up the tinting. The new formula saves you that entire step for most colors. You wash, it settles into the recesses, and the raised surfaces stay pretty close to your original basecoat. More time for pushing highlights, less time cleaning up.

The tradeoff: the new formula is noticeably glossy. Areas where you build up multiple wash layers get super shiny. A coat of matte varnish at the end fixes this completely, and many of us varnish our models anyway. Just something to be aware of.

Also worth noting: you now get 18ml bottles instead of the old 24ml, for the same price. So that's 25% less paint per bottle. Classic move.

Vallejo and Other Brands

GW shades aren't the only game in town. Vallejo makes a solid wash range that comes in dropper bottles (which is already a win over GW's tippy pots). Army Painter makes washes too. Most miniature paint brands have their version.

The main differences between brands come down to flow, pigment density, and drying time. Some are thinner and pool more aggressively. Some have more pigment and tint harder. Experiment with what your local store carries. They all do fundamentally the same thing.

One thing I do with all my GW shades these days is transfer them to dropper bottles. Look, if it helps me avoid one spill, the whole bag of bottles has paid for itself. I'll put links to the dropper bottles and everything else I use regularly in the description.

Oil Washes: The Game Changer

Alright, let's talk about oil washes. This is the one that made me rethink everything about shading miniatures.

Oil washes use oil-based paint (the kind traditional artists use) thinned down with mineral spirits or white spirit. The reason they're special is that oil paint has an extremely long working time. Where acrylic washes start drying in minutes and can leave tide marks if you mess with them, oil washes stay workable for hours. You can push them around, clean them up, pull them back off raised surfaces, and generally take your time to get exactly the result you want.

How to Use an Oil Wash

The process is straightforward:

1. Varnish your model first. This is important. Apply a coat of gloss or satin varnish over your acrylic paint job before you do an oil wash. This protects your acrylic layers from the mineral spirits and also creates a smooth surface that helps the oil wash flow into recesses cleanly.
2. Mix your wash. Take a small amount of oil paint (black, brown, or whatever shadow color you want) and thin it heavily with mineral spirits on your palette. You want it very fluid. Like dirty water.
3. Apply it all over. Slop it on. Don't be precious about it. Let it run into all the recesses.
4. Wait about 15-20 minutes. Let it settle but don't let it fully dry.
5. Clean up the raised surfaces. Take a clean brush barely dampened with mineral spirits and gently wipe the oil wash off the raised areas. It comes right off because the gloss varnish underneath is smooth and non-porous. The wash stays in the recesses where you want it.
6. Let it dry fully. Oil paint takes longer to dry than acrylic. Give it several hours, ideally overnight.
7. Seal with matte varnish once dry to kill the glossy look and protect the oil layer.

The result is incredibly clean. Dark, defined recess shadows with perfectly clean raised surfaces. No tide marks. No tinting where you don't want it. It's the kind of result that makes people ask "how long did you spend on those shadows?" and the answer is "about ten minutes of actual work plus waiting for it to dry."

When I tested the new GW shade formula, I said it "acts an awful lot like oil washes." That's the highest compliment I can give an acrylic wash. The new shades are genuinely moving in this direction, which is great for people who don't want to deal with mineral spirits and the extra steps. But for maximum control, oil washes are still the king.

DIY Washes From Regular Paint

Remember, washes are just very thin paint. You can make your own from any acrylic paint you already own. I do this all the time for colors where I don't have a dedicated wash product.

Take a tiny bit of paint on your wet palette. Add more and more water until it looks like food coloring water. Barely tinted. Typically that's about five drops of water to one tiny brush tip of paint. That's it. That's a wash.

I use this trick constantly for skin tones. A watery red applied into the orc's mouth, even over the teeth, settles into the cracks and leaves the teeth stained, which looks surprisingly natural. A little around the eyes and in the ears gives that faint look of natural coloration and irritation. You can do this with any color for any effect.

The control isn't as precise as a commercial wash (homemade ones can be a bit unpredictable in how they pool), but for specific color effects and for experimenting, mixing your own is free and endlessly flexible.

Recess Shading vs. All-Over Wash

There are two ways to apply a wash, and which one you use depends on what you're after.

All-Over Wash

This is the "slop it everywhere" approach. Load your brush, spread the wash across the entire surface, and let it do its thing. The wash will naturally settle into recesses and pull away from raised areas. It's fast, it's easy, and for most tabletop painting it looks great.

The downside is that even the best washes leave some tinting on the raised surfaces. Your bright red becomes a slightly darker, slightly muddier red. Your clean bone color gets a brownish film. For a lot of models, this is totally fine and actually looks good. For competition pieces or anything where you want maximum vibrancy, you'll need to go back and repaint those raised areas.

Recess Shading

This is the precise approach. Instead of washing the whole surface, you carefully apply the wash only into the recesses, panel lines, and crevices. The raised surfaces stay completely clean.

It takes longer because you're being deliberate about where the wash goes. But the result is very clean, and you skip the step of having to repaint raised areas. This is the approach that gets closest to what an oil wash does automatically (darken the shadows, leave the highlights alone).

I use all-over washes when I'm batch painting armies and I just need things to look good on the table. I use recess shading when I'm painting something I really care about and I want total control over where the shadows fall.

Fixing Tide Marks

Tide marks. The bane of every wash user's existence. Those ugly rings of dried pigment that form where the wash pooled and dried unevenly, usually on flat surfaces like cloaks, shields, or vehicle panels.

The old GW shades were particularly bad about this. The edges would dry fairly fast, and if you accidentally touched them or tried to move the paint around, you'd get coffee staining. The new formula is much better here because it stays workable longer. You can see pooling in areas you don't want it, soak it up, and not worry about creating tide marks.

For acrylic washes in general, here's how to deal with tide marks:

• Prevention: Don't overload your brush. Apply less wash and push it where you want it. On flat surfaces, apply in one smooth pass and don't go back over areas that have started to dry.
• Catch them early: If you see a wash pooling where you don't want it, quickly clean your brush, dab it on a paper towel, and use the damp brush to wick up the excess. Do this while the wash is still wet.
• Fix after drying: If tide marks have already dried, the easiest fix is to repaint the basecoat color over the affected area and then carefully re-apply the wash just in the recess.

This is another area where oil washes shine. Because they stay workable for so long, tide marks basically don't happen. You clean up the raised surfaces and any pooling before it dries. Problem solved before it starts.

Application Technique

A few universal tips that apply regardless of which wash product you're using:

Don't overload the brush. This is the number one mistake. A brush dripping with wash is going to flood the model and pool in all the wrong places. Load the brush, touch the tip to your paper towel to remove excess, then apply. You can always add more. You can't un-add.

Push the wash into recesses. Don't just slap it on and hope. Use the tip of your brush to guide the wash into the areas where you want shadows. Washes have a longer working time than regular paint, so push them around until they settle where you want them.

Work one section at a time. Don't wash the entire model in one go. Do the face, let it settle, do the armor, let it settle. This gives you control and prevents different areas from bleeding into each other.

Soak up pooling immediately. If you see wash gathering on a flat surface or in an area where you don't want a dark spot, clean your brush, dab it dry, and use it like a sponge to absorb the excess. This takes two seconds and prevents 90% of wash problems.

Washes and the New GW Shades: Glossy Finish

One thing to be aware of with the new GW shade formula: areas where you build up layers of wash will be noticeably glossy. I'm guessing they use some form of gloss medium in the recipe to get the shades to slide over raised surfaces more easily. It makes the wash perform better, but it also means certain parts of your model end up shinier than others.

The fix is simple. Matte varnish over the whole model once you're done painting. This kills the shine, evens out the finish, and protects your paint job all in one step. Then just go back and add a gloss or satin varnish to anything you want to be shiny (gems, lenses, wet-looking surfaces). Many of us varnish our models anyway, so this isn't really an extra step.

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Now go slop some wash on something. Trust me on this one. The first time you see a flat-looking model suddenly come alive with shadows, you'll understand why people call this stuff liquid talent. Now get out there and slay the gray.

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